Monday, June 14, 2010

Follow up on Josiah Quincy House Class Project

Randall Stephens

About a month back I posted here on a fruitful class project I undertook with undergraduates. Since then the local paper, the Patriot Ledger, has done two stories on the resource website we created for the Josiah Quincy House. (As we worked on the JQ House website we tracked down loads of digital sources, included an extensive bibliography, along with photos, maps, illustrations, and a video interview.) Jack Encarnacao, a reporter for the paper, met with me, museums operations manager Leah Walczak, and the students at the Quincy home. A photographer snapped some shots as well. Fun stuff. I post here excerpts from the Ledger articles:

QUINCY — Professor Randall Stephens' class at Eastern Nazarene College studied the Josiah Quincy House in Wollaston, one of the city’s lower-key but significant historic sites. The home was built in 1770 by Revolutionary War colonel Josiah Quincy, son of Col. John Quincy, after whom the city is named.

The fruit of the class’s research – skimmed from Library of Congress archives, journals and maps – is on display at a Web site the students created: enc.edu/history/jq.

Stephens said he was pleasantly surprised at how evocative the house was to students, and the extent to which they were motivated to dig for nuggets of interesting Quincy history. Much of the historical information about the house comes from Eliza Susan Quincy, who in the 1880s kept journals, inventoried the contents of the house and commissioned photographs of its interior. She wrote about how Josiah Quincy had stood on the residence’s roof to monitor troop movements in Boston Harbor early in the American Revolution. >>>

QUINCY — After a larger than expected turnout for last Saturday’s tour of the Josiah Quincy House, Historic New England is offering several more opportunities for the public to check out the historic home in Wollaston.

More than 100 people showed up for the free tours last week. The house is at 20 Muirhead St. and is usually open to the public only once or twice a year. . . .

Leah Walczak, Historic New England’s museum operations manager, said tours were added because of renewed interest in the site tied to recent publicity of a class project website built by students at Eastern Nazarene College which is also in the Wollaston section of Quincy. >>>